'Columbinus' a rare portrayal of an increasingly common tragedy

When an artist is telling a story about a shooting that killed children in a school, a very real shooting like the one that forever scarred the soul of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., that artist has a moral obligation to raise his or her game. Such moments are not a time for the inauthentic, manipulative, cheap. Not when the survivors of that devastating event are sitting right there in the audience, reliving an event with the good people of Chicago, willing everyone to learn from what took place in 1999, even if Columbine is now just one name on a savagely perplexing educational list that includes Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University and, most recently, Newtown.

Such was the situation Wednesday night at American Theater Company, where artistic director P.J. Paparelli was unleashing his revised "Columbinus," a devastating oral-history piece that had a 2006 production at the New York Theater Workshop, but that now contains an entirely new third act, the product of Paparelli (whose co-author is Stephen Karam) returning to Littleton over recent months to find out how people felt and what the survivors were doing, 13 years after the heavily armed Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold came to their suburban high school, loaded with pain and pipe bombs, and opened fire on their classmates. Back then, it was an aberration. These days, it is perilously close to feeling routine. This is why "Columbinus" packs such a new punch.

Paparelli and his ensemble cast — Matthew Bausone, Rob Fenton, Eric Folks, Jerod Haynes, Kelly O'Sullivan, whose raw emotions nearly carry her away, Leah Raidt, Tyler Ravelson, Sadieh Rifai — clearly understood the moral imperatives behind this particular project. Games have been raised all around. Most certainly, Paparelli is doing far and away his best work in the theater since his arrival in Chicago six years ago. "Columbinus" has been living with him for years, and it shows in how carefully he has thought out and realized every moment of this production, including a third act that contextualizes what took place on that horrible but hardly unique day, if such a thing could ever be explained in any cogent way. In essence, this new version of "Columbinus" now contains the back story, the day itself and the reflective aftermath, cathartic in some ways (it's striking how many of the Columbine survivors went into the caring professions) but also deeply unsettling. At the end of Act 2, which contains a re-creation of what happened in the school library and is very hard to watch, nobody in the audience moved a muscle. No applause. Just silence.

Paparelli and his actors — everyone is exquisitely cast, but Eric Folks, who plays Klebold with a truly remarkable intensity and ease, goes above and beyond — do their damnedest to achieve two goals. One is to simply tell the story of what happened that day, and the other is probe why it took place. The "why," of course, is the reason to buy a ticket. One is not overburdened with solutions to this particularly American problem, and his piece of art engages with the problem in a very profound way.

The story begins, really, with a snooze alarm, a metaphor for how all days like this (9/11 comes to mind) invariably start out in the most ordinary way. And then the world explodes and you come to see that the routine is precious.

"Columbinus," which you don't want to miss, if you can bear this topic, achieves many things, but one of its most remarkable accomplishments is how well, in its first act, it charts the progression of teenage alienation, a quotidian emotion, perhaps, but not one that mixes well with the easy availability of firepower in these United States.

Clearly, Harris and Klebold left clues that were missed — in the new third act, the show makes much of the filing of a police report by a family at the school who wanted to alert the authorities to a website that prefigured what these boys later would do. That report was never acted upon. But even as "Columbinus" argues that innumerable authority figures missed explicit warning signs, it also points out that other, simpler things might have stopped these fusions of angry young men and ordinary kids. What if the other kids at the school had not bullied Harris? What if a potential prom date had not run scared? What if one of the guidance counselors actually had provided real guidance to troubled kids whose intelligence far exceeded their emotional and moral capabilities? What if a dad had actually reacted appropriately when told by phone that a clip of ammunition had come into a gun store, as ordered from that very phone without that parent's knowledge? Was not that worth a moment of further inquiry?

Whenever you hear about a school shooting, you are always overcome by the waste of potential, the lives that might have changed the world, wiped out in a moment. William Boles' seemingly simple but quite brilliant set for "Columbinus" is dominated by a huge chalkboard — agent of playing, learning and, eventually, memorial. I have only one real criticism of this remarkable artistic achievement — the plethora of gunshots in the soundscape, rattling the already rattled. But then that might just be me.